Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Storytelling has a narcotic power.
People perish. Books are immortal.
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
A police state is a country run by criminals
But only a fool sails into combat with nature
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.
History is too important to be left to the historians.
To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.
The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.
We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature.
If one first gives himself to the Lord, all other giving is easy.
There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.
Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.
You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.
Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.
Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.
Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.
If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.
I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.
The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.
Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.
You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.
Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.
What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!
Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?
If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.
It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.
That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.
You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.
The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.
Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it's more complicated.
Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.
[Boxer is] the ultimate tool for the serious pro' that can't afford the time and patience to mess around with lesser products.
Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.
I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics, especially if you're there for a long time.
In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.
One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.
What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason
I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.
To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.